In his lavishly illustrated Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon, Nathaniel Robert Walker reconstructs and analyzes the “ideas, longings, and values that gave rise to the modern suburb” in Britain and the United States (1). Over the course of the nineteenth century, he argues, English-speaking voices on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in a continuous dialog about the problems of the modern city and potential alternatives to urban life. Walker contends that the writers of utopian and dystopian fictions played a particularly prominent role in this ongoing conversation, one that was consistently focused on escaping or replacing contemporary cities rather than reforming or improving them. Regardless of their individual political values (which ranged from conservative to socialist and all points in between), Walker argues, the writers of utopian fictions were united by a common criticism of urban “density” and the desire to address it via schemes of geographic and demographic “dispersal” (3–4). Walker contends that it is in this common vision that we find the origins of twentieth- and twenty-first-century suburban life, asserting that by the 1880s, on both sides of the Atlantic, “English language utopias” became “estranged from the modern city” and “universally fixated upon a glassy cottage at the end of a flowery cul-de-sac” (293).
Ebenezer Howard, founder of the garden city movement and celebrated promoter of suburban life, arguably is the figure around whom Walker's study turns. In later life, Howard recalled experiencing a life-changing epiphany after reading Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). Howard claimed that encountering this novel—a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic—inspired him to give up his work as a stenographer and become an urban planner. Walker observes, however, that while “Bellamy clearly planted a powerful seed in Howard's imagination, it had been made fertile by other, earlier sources,” a point that Howard acknowledged, noting that these prior influences were so varied and wide ranging that it would be “exceedingly difficult” to trace “a comprehensive list” of them in any detail (457). Yet Walker arguably supplies just such an exhaustive genealogy, providing an unprecedentedly inclusive survey of nineteenth-century utopian writings about the city and analyzing the contents of these works alongside a range of other contemporary writings about cities by reformers, politicians, and architects.
The extensiveness of Walker's treatment of this utopian literature arguably is both the book's greatest strength and weakness. Walker engages with an enormous range of visionary works, revisiting well-known texts like Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), Benjamin Ward Richardson's Hygeia: A City of Health (1874), and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), while also introducing us to a host of long-neglected texts with such suggestive titles as Another World, or Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah (1873) by the failed theater manager turned lawyer Benjamin Lumley; or Pyrna, A Commune; or, Under the Ice (1875) and A Palace of Crystal (1877) by another long-forgotten lawyer-novelist, Ellis James Davis. In uncovering and acquainting the reader with so many forgotten works of British and American utopian fiction, Walker has provided a laudable service to historians, literary critics, art historians, and other scholars interested in nineteenth-century ideas about cities, future cities, utopian communities, and urban alternatives.
The exhaustiveness of his analysis, however, also makes the book a ponderous read at times. This is made more so because while Walker consistently presents and analyzes the content of his many sources with great clarity and care, it is not always clear how much, or in what ways, the alternative visions of society portrayed in these works influenced the lives of other nineteenth-century persons reading them. Indeed, it is not always clear how many people even read many of these works at all. Some were indisputably widely known. Bellamy's novel, for example, had sold over half a million copies in the United States by 1895, and a quarter of a million in the British Isles (426). At the opposite end of the spectrum, however, were texts like James Casey's A New Moral World (1885), a self-published novel by a man about whom we know almost nothing besides the fact that he lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and that even Walker admits made “so little impact that almost nothing has ever been written about it” (284). Despite this observation, Walker nevertheless dedicates multiple pages to analyzing Casey's text (284–86), but it is not entirely clear why. Beyond the fact that Casey's novel replicates tendencies and tropes observable in other contemporary texts, Walker offers no explanation for why it is deserving of sustained scrutiny. Walker's analyses of many other texts left me asking the same question.
Furthermore, Walker contends more generally that by the 1870s, “readers were used to looking beneath the surface of science-fiction stories to discern serious critiques of the present world and its future possibilities” (149). But did they? Always? In what contexts and with what frequency? On these questions, Walker provides less concrete evidence, freely admitting that many readers may have been drawn to these works in search of a “tranquilizing dose of escapism” (117). Given the well-documented influence of Bellamy's novel on Howard's ideas and life trajectory, it seems clear that these fictional works could exert a considerable influence on real life affairs, but the reader is left to wonder whether Howard was an outlier or representative where such influences were concerned. This is the case in part because Walker's own analytic endgame is also primarily focused on a future reality outside the chronological bounds of his subject: the suburbs of the twentieth century facilitated by the rise of automobility. As a result, throughout this work, he analyzes nineteenth-century utopian writings in relation to these suburbs of the future, while making almost no mention of the suburbs that already existed in the nineteenth century. By the 1840s, there were many places in Britain (Edgbaston, for example) where one could find the type of dispersed housing set amid the human-constructed nature that Walker argues constituted the idealized, alternative (sub)urban environments these authors envisioned. It thus would have further enhanced the appeal of this fascinating book to learn more about the relationship between the contemporary fictional visions Walker so thoroughly and extensively documents and the already existing suburban landscapes of the nineteenth century.
